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Thursday, August 19, 2010

Coles Puts Customers Last

For ages now, all the Coles supermarkets I use have had a nice simple EFT setup. While the cashier is scanning your purchases, you could swipe your loyalty card if you had one and you could swipe your credit/debit card and select your account. At the end, you could quickly enter your PIN, wait a few seconds for the receipt to be printed and be on your way.

Today, the local Coles introduced a new "improved" system that finally took into account the chip on your debit/credit card. And, at the same time removed the little bit of streamlining that everybody has become accustomed to. You can no longer do anything with the card reader until the cashier has finished, and you can't swipe your loyalty card at all—that difficult task is now reserved to the cashier. So you wait, then you insert your card, then you wait until the machine is ready, then you select your account and wait a bit more. Finally, you get to enter your PIN. This all adds a noticeable delay to the checkout process.

Coles, it's not an improvement at all and there's just no excuse for it.

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